PhD, University of California, Berkeley, History
MA, University of California, Berkeley, History
BA, Yale College, summa cum laude, Archeological Studies and History

Research Interests

Professor Johnson’s research is closely related to the courses that she offers. Her current research focuses on cross-cultural encounters, proto-ethnography, memory, and the experience of violence in the sixteenth-century Habsburg Empire. She is also interested in questions of material and visual culture, religious and cultural identities, and theorizing colonialism in the early modern era. This work has been supported by grants from the John Carter Brown Library (NEH Fellowship), the Huntington Library (Barbara S. Thom Fellowship), the Graves Foundation (ACLS Award for Outstanding Teaching), the Fulbright Program (Austria), and the Woodrow Wilson Institute (Postdoctoral Humanities Fellowship at Northwestern University).

Recent Courses

The World Since 1492 (HIST/ANTH11) with Professors O’Rourke and Segal

Travel and Encounter, 1200-1800 (HIST64)

The Sixteenth-Century Problem with Profit (HIST73)

Holiness, Heresy, and the Body (HIST74), cross-listed with GFS

Medieval Thought (HIST/PHIL119) with Professor Keeley

Empire and Sexuality: Gender, Nations, British and French Colonialism (HIST134), cross-listed with GFS, IDAAS

Women and Gender in Europe, 1300-1650 (HIST178), cross-listed with GFS

The Seminar in History (HIST197)

Selected Publications

Cultural Hierarchy in Sixteenth-Century Europe: the Ottomans and Aztecs. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011(hb) and 2014 (pb).

“Imperial Succession and Mirrors of Tyranny in the Houses of Habsburg and Osman,” ed. Barbara Fuchs and Emily Weissbourd. Rivalry and Rhetoric in the Mediterranean. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015.

“Aztec Regalia and the Reformation of Display,” in Daniela Bleichmar and Peter C. Mancall, eds., Collecting Across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.

“Stone Gods and Counter-Reformation Knowledges,” in Pamela H. Smith and Benjamin Schmidt, eds. Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe : Practices, Objects, and Texts, 1400-1800. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008.

“Some Peculiarities of Empire in the Early Modern Era,” in Politics and Reformations: Communities, Polities, Nations, and Empires: Essays in Honor of Thomas A. Brady, Jr. Boston: Brill, 2007.

“Idolatrous Cultures and the Practice of Religion,” The Journal of the History of Ideas, vol.67, no. 4 (2006).

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